Plan Offers No Picnic for Union Square Park

Oh thank God, finally we will have a place to catch a high-toned meal inside Union Square Park.

Otherwise we’d have to cross the street.

We are a city filled with crusaders, from organizers for tenant rights and sick days, to those more quixotic souls who embrace the battle for ferret rights, or free-range goldfish. In the latter vein, credit is due to the Union Square Partnership, which, with an assist from the Bloomberg mayoralty, waged a yearslong struggle to place a high-priced restaurant in Union Square Park.

Michael R. Bloomberg now paces about the fastness of his Upper East Side mansion. But to be kept in fine fennel, to inhale kale and so spike your vitamin K levels, to savor a cut of wild Siberian salmon is apparently still to be regarded as a birthright. Even in an elegant old pavilion in a densely packed 3.6-acre park.

A coalition of neighborhood residents battled this restaurant and the case went to the New York State courts, which recently ruled in favor of the partnership. A judge asked a Law Department lawyer, Deborah A. Brenner, if more or less any restaurant could be regarded as an appropriate “park use.” This, she allowed, was correct, although she felt compelled to add: “I mean, I could envision a case where if 98 percent of a park were being turned into a food court, that might be a problem.”

This is a caveat to treasure.

In this age of privatized parks, of conservancies who pay their leaders more than the city pays its parks commissioner, the partnership’s plan to put a restaurant in this pavilion almost registers as unremarkable.

Almost.

A beautiful children’s playground sits at the foot of the pavilion. There is not another playground to be found for many blocks, and during the summer it is packed, which offers the appetizing possibility that a diner, well sated, might splash a Sancerre on a tyke’s head.

“The smell of food and liquor will waft down into the playground,” said Carol Greitzer, a former councilwoman, longtime neighborhood resident and member of the Union Square Community Coalition, which has fought this plan.

It’s worth noting, even in pasteurized, gilded-about-the-earlobes Manhattan, that the pavilion is hallowed ground. It’s where generations of dissidents flocked like migratory birds to agitate and demonstrate. Long before the farmers’ market offered 42 varieties of artisanal cheese, Emma Goldman, a stout and eloquent anarchist, raged about the right to birth control and the necessity of resisting capitalist wars. Socialists in 1912 held signs — “Workers Fight the Wars and the Bosses Reap the Profits” — and chanted against the march into the killing fields of World War I.

Dorothy Day, the beautifully austere Catholic Worker radical, stood on a platform in front of this pavilion and gave an early and brave speech against the killing in Vietnam. Then five men burned their draft cards, risking imprisonment. Gay men, lesbians, black and brown, yellow and white: This was their troublemaking lodestone.

It’s not necessary to embrace their every struggle and howl, to appreciate that strands of our DNA are found here. “You can’t do this; this is our history,” said Geoffrey Croft of N.Y.C. Park Advocates, a watchdog group. “There’s nothing progressive about displacing families and seniors from a corner of a public park, and eliminating one of the most famous free-speech sites.”

This battle began some years back, when the partnership announced that an anonymous someone had donated $7 million to freshen up the north end of the park, and to place a restaurant in the pavilion. The generosity was no doubt heartfelt, but it does prompt a Type-A New York question.

Who asked for the dough?

Assemblyman Richard N. Gottfried rolled that question over on its belly. “The fact that you’re getting money to do something that you shouldn’t do doesn’t mean you should go and do it.”

That question now tumbles downtown, to City Hall. When Bill de Blasio was the public advocate, he spoke against this restaurant. Now, as mayor, he inherits his Law Department’s victory in favor of it.

His staff says Mr. de Blasio is reviewing the issues. He might want to stroll this park and listen to our city’s ghosts.